1. Tim W Brown says:

    I enjoyed the film, but it was definitely a notch below the original – in other words, I consider it a fairly solid, but typical, sequel.

    —spoiler alert just in case—

    I agree the jokes felt just a bit off-kilter, mostly from being less tied into the flow of story and action. The thing that really triggered my thinking about it, though, was the one point where a joke was *not* made. In the final confrontation in the first film, the big dramatic fight scene is suddenly broken by Starlord invoking a dance-off. It looks stupid and silly, but it turns out to have been the distraction that allows the Guardians to pull their winning move. I was very much expecting something similar in Volume 2, especially since the final showdown was a similar extravaganza of SFX and interaction. Of all places, this is where Starlord should have pulled something completely out of the box, but instead it came down to just another “I think I can, I think I can” where the hero wins by force of will rather than the wild cleverness that is – or should be – his trademark.

    I wholeheartedly agree with your fourth point. I find refuge in the TV/Netflix Marvel series, which have indeed been focusing on smaller stories, less cosmic heroes, and more interactions with everyday people and a more down-to-earth world (no pun intended, but I’ll take it).

    And to be honest, I couldn’t help but crack a smile at the fifth point. Character death in superhero comics is practically a joke (to comics fans, at least); many superheroes have died “permanently” only to reappear some time later with a hand-waving explanation. The idea of permanent death is very much swimming upstream against the source material, and given Hollywood’s predilection for happy endings, I doubt we’ll see it on the big screen, at least until the actors get far too old and/or tired of their assigned roles (and even then, given actor replacement technology, that’s an open question).

    Looking forward to Volume 2 of your list…

    • Hi Tim,

      Totally agree on that last point. I recall that there used to be a saying that the only permanent deaths in comics are Uncle Ben, Jason Todd and Bucky…and even THAT’s not true anymore. That’s actually part of what drove me to indie comics for a while.

  2. I haven’t watched the Marvel movies for a while now, but it sounds like they’re suffering the same problem that superhero comics in general suffer from…cheap, reversible deaths.

What do you think?